In emergency or disaster situations, emergency response operations must be organized, efficient and timely to minimize damage to life and property as well as infrastructure. This includes emergency response operations having the ability to quickly disseminate information and also communicate with population members, of whom may be members of the public. Many of these population members may be unknown individuals and may be varied in many different aspects, such as device usage or network, locations, as well as condition or need. These then provide a problem for emergency operations centers and responders, in that it is very difficult to disseminate and communicate with such a broad population whom may be entirely unknown. In addition, further problems and difficulty arise from a need to quickly react to, classify, store and analyze information as well as provide further information to responders or the members of the population across different devices, networks and location. This is exacerbated too by the need for both downstream, but also upstream communication.
These problems then necessitates that the infrastructure of the response organization network needs more than just the ability to dispatch the closest responder, as today's systems do, but also provide for an accessible information system which may provide for efficient downstream information from the organization, government or other entity to those affected, or upstream, from either bystanders or those affected by the emergency to the emergency response system, and where the information may then be used to improve response and prioritize or send the proper response or responses, as well as provide for other immediate services, as well as future data keeping and tracking etc., as an information database all over a resilient data network.
During an emergency event, obtaining accurate and actionable information from the public may be a top priority for emergency management personnel and as such the present invention may facilitate such. In an embodiment, this information may provide the emergency operations command (EOC) with critical data, also referred to as Situational Awareness (SA), required in providing a more effective emergency response. Emergency events may generally include various groups of persons: The Public—individuals such as local residents and transient populations (including those at their place of employment, those shopping at local businesses, those traversing the area on their way to or from their destination, and tourists) located within the emergency zone, but unaffiliated with an emergency relief agency; First Responders—including EOC personnel, Fire, Police, and other persons providing emergency response activities directly under control of the local EOC; and Outside Agencies—including both government and non-profit relief agencies such as Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). Emergency events take many forms, which could be natural (such as a hurricane, tornado, flood, or wildfire) or manmade. Manmade events could either be accidental (such as a large industrial accident, train derailment, etc.) or deliberate (bombings, active shooters, etc.). Emergency events affecting a large portion of the population may also be health related, such as pandemic flu (or similar airborne pathogen or contagion).
Emergency events may also have phases associated to them such as: ADVANCED WARNING—a period of time prior to the event where there may be some indication that an event has a high degree of occurring. IMPACT—the period when the emergency event occurs. IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH—the period of time that the public and EOC personnel may be assessing the situation and determining how to respond. RECOVERY AND REBUILDING—the period of time following the stabilization of the emergency event and the EOC has control over the situation. Emergency events, and their associated phases, have varying periods of duration. An emergency event could be either a few days, or could extend for many months or years.
The most generally recognized method for the general public to respond during an emergency may be to call 9-1-1, which is the widely accepted system for requesting emergency services, and generally not for obtaining or providing the EOC with information of a non-emergency nature. A system that allows any unknown member of the public (MOTP) to contact the local EOC directly to provide or receive information that may be directly relevant to them has not been attempted. Moreover, no system exists that allows any MOTP to interact with the local EOC even when the MOTP may be not in the emergency event zone. During an emergency event, the affected MOTP must rely upon generalized announcements provided through various channels such as the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) that broadcast over regional television and radio, Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) that broadcast to all mobile devices within a geographic, or geo-fenced, area (also referred to as Commercial Mass Alert Systems (CMAS)), or through general Public Service Announcements (PSA), among other simple internet broadcasts.
With each of these general announcement systems, the number of persons who have received the message and taken action upon it, the penetration rate, is generally unknown and communication generally only travels upstream. The time between when the EOC determines what information they wish to provide to the public until the actual transmission of that message could be significant depending upon the degree of control that the local EOC has over the aforementioned general announcement systems and the lag time in them. The use of social media during an emergency event has grown significantly in the recent past as a means for the public to share information, including during emergency events. The social media approach to emergency response communications has arisen from the public's ability to access information in real-time, and in the absence of an EOC-controlled system for real-time information. However, the use of social media as an emergency response information tool has proven to be problematic. First, the nature of an unstructured dialogue amongst a large number of users may be challenging to decipher. Assessing exactly what may be being said, who may be saying it, and its relevance to the event at hand cannot be attained unless every message is read. Another significant challenge to using social media as an emergency response communications tool may be disinformation. Incomplete, inaccurate, and misleading information (whether through accident or deliberate action) creates more work for the EOC as they must expend efforts to correct bad information as well as to push out the right message. Yet another significant challenge to using social media as an emergency response communications tool is that the social media landscape is constantly changing. Emergency management personnel that use social media must decide which of the social media channels they will use, have a presence and expertise with each social media outlet, and continuously monitor the application settings as features and functionality evolve.
As the recovery period of an emergency event begins, the public may make their way to shelters or relief centers. The First Responders and Outside Agencies at these shelters generally have little or no information about the people who may be arriving; nor do the MOTP arriving know what services may be available until after they have stood in line and completed some type of questionnaire or intake form. This paperwork may be generally set aside for processing at a later time, and knowing exactly what services may be provided to a specific MOTP may be not a primary consideration during the relief process—generally due to the lack of a system capable of unobtrusively capturing this information in real time, and not because of a lack of interest in the information.
Communications networks often become overloaded in may be affected by an emergency event. Notwithstanding physical damage or destruction of the cellular network, the significant increase in voice and data traffic causes the network to become overloaded and fail. Because Short Message Services (SMS), also known as ‘texting’, consumes only a fraction of the bandwidth required for voice or data, emergency response agencies such as FEMA encourage the public to “text first”. Texting may be the most common and heavily used form of communication. Texting is also a standard feature of nearly every model of mobile cellular device; it generally does not require any additional account or activation; and has the same austere user interface across all device types that may be easily understood and does not require familiarity to use.
The Prior Art systems then do not, at the least, provide for an ability to connect to a unknown public audience as well as personnel, and relay information, data or communication in response to an emergency event, such that aid, information and deployment may be completed efficiently using a cohesive system or method. Thus, there is a need for a response system which may provide for the ability to provide for an efficient, fast and proper response, including updatable records and information on any scale, and of which may include the ability to span actors, agencies, and organizational boundaries, as well as provide two-way information across the response spectrum, from the emergency location, all the way to the response centers and staging or operations using resilient communication networks.